SCHOOL HITS WILL
VARY UNDER STATE
FUNDING FORMULA

Some districts could see more money than
others with governor’s budget proposal

north county 
Eric Dill, an assistant superintendent for the San Dieguito Union High School District, doesn’t think about how a proposal to overhaul funding for California schools would affect his district every minute of the day and night.

“Only every waking moment,” said Dill, who pores over the budget of the 13,500-student coastal district each year as state-imposed cuts decimate spending in his and other districts throughout California.

Dill is one of dozens of school administrators throughout the state who have faced millions of dollars in cuts to education over the years.

Now, as legislators in Sacramento wrestle with a gubernatorial proposal to restructure how state money is doled out to schools, officials at the district level are grappling with the idea that they could lose even more because of the ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds of their students.

As part of his preliminary budget released in January, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed that the state give school districts $4,920 to spend per student each year. Districts would receive additional money, depending on how many English-language learners attend their schools. Even more money would be added to their budgets, depending on the number of financially poor students in the district.

For districts like the San Dieguito Union High School District, which has less than 5 percent of its students listed as English-language learners and little more than 8 percent of its students on the federally funded free and reduced lunch plan, the proposal could mean the loss of hundreds of dollars in funding per student per year.

“Under this formula, the way that it’s revolutionized, we’re heavily penalized,” Dill said. “(The formula) is a valid concept but only if first they look at the resources that are required to adequately educate students and implement it based on that. But they didn’t do it that way.”

The new funding formula, which would be phased in over the next six years, would particularly affect funding for districts like San Dieguito, which relies heavily on property tax money to operate. Those districts, called basic aid districts, receive less money from the state since they have more money coming in from their own, mostly wealthy, communities.

Brown’s proposal would replace the property tax money that’s funneled into basic aid districts with flat funding from the state, meaning that spending in those districts could drop even more than they already have. San Dieguito, for example, spends more than $7,000 on each of its students annually. The new formula would lower that figure by $1,869.

While proponents of the plan say it’s fair since every student should be treated equally, Jeffrey Frost, legislative advocate for the California Association of Suburban School Districts, said the flat-rate funding is too low for all districts. The figure, he said, is based on the $18 billion the state has cut from schools in the past four years.

“We’re now at a point where we can barely provide a quality academic program,” Frost said. “If you’re basically holding them at this level now, which is an artificially low funding rate because of all the cuts, then is that an adequate amount of money to educate children in the way we as Californians want them educated?”